Roots > The Magic Food Bus
The Magic Food Bus
Sisters' Camelot cruises the streets looking for hungry stomachs
By Emily Garber
Teresa Hichens-Olson knew there was something missing from her program when one of her students at the Urban Arts Academy in south Minneapolis had never eaten an orange before.
“He tried to eat it like an apple,” she says. “He didn’t know he shouldn’t eat the peel.”
So Hichens-Olson called Sisters’ Camelot, a non-profit organization that shares free organic groceries, to fill in the gaps.
Although Sisters’ canvassing materials and phone are in a storefront office in south Minneapolis, its real office is a huge converted Sacramento transit bus with art and slogans that would make any art car jealous. For more than 10 years now, the group has been licensed to run what the City of Minneapolis has dubbed a “mobile food shelf.”
Sisters’ collects nearly expired organic food from Co-op Partners Warehouse in St. Paul and Albert’s Organics in Mounds View. Whether it’s a few boxes of lettuce or an entire busload of produce, the group hands out the food to school programs like Urban Arts Academy, community centers such as the Aliveness Project, or they simply park the bus on a random corner and tell people to hop on board.
“We use mainly two distributors,” says Tracy Steidl, who works for Sisters’ fundraising committee. “There’s got to be like 20 or 30 other warehouses around the Twin Cities area that have the same problems of overstock. And we’re just dealing with two of them. So you can imagine how wasteful the industry can be.”
Eric Gooden, the foodshare coordinator, likes seeing the immediate results of his work with the collective. After years of working for non-profits like Clean Water Action, he’s become frustrated with the lawmaking process.
“We’re just normal people going out and doing normal things, getting free food that would otherwise end up in the trash,” he says. “Trying to change laws or anything like that is totally disempowering to people. I don’t need a representative to represent me. I can represent myself.”